[tex-live] TL2004: Technical problems and testing

[Petr Olsak]

On Wed, 12 May 2004, Karl Berry wrote:

>     unprintable stuff spewed on a terminal, the terminal's status may get
>     thoroughly screwed.
>
> Indeed.
>
> Here are my opinions:
>
> 1) for every release of Web2c TeX and TeX Live ever made, the default
>    has been to use the locale-dependent isprint to determine whether to
>    use ^^ notation for the log/tty output.  Am I wrong about that?
>    Assuming that is correct, I don't think we should change it for TL.

No every releases.
Till 2002:    if no --translate-file was specified then isprint() from
              locale was activated.
              if --transalte-file was specified then TeX was fully locale
              independent.
TeXlive 2003: The tty/log output was separed from \write output.
              The --translate-file affects only \write output and
              isprint() from locales is active for tty/log output
              regardless --translate-file is specified.

This change was a source of confusions because it was not cleanly
documented. Users lose the security that if --transalte-file is used then
we are sure that all textual outputs are controlled by TCX table.

Petr Olsak